Saturday, September 17, 2011

When it comes to home servers, Linux is king. It’s free, it’s efficient, and the possibilities are endless! Join us as we go through the many ways to keep your open-source server streaming and serving up stuff for you.

First and Foremost: Remote Access

If you’re running Linux, then odds are that remote access from anywhere is first in your mind. For that reason, let’s start with the obvious:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

This will let you access your Ubuntu installation via SSH, so you can do things like install programs from the command-line without having to be at your computer. To get more fancy, you can enable access via VNC for GUI-based interaction. (Our guide on that one is a bit old, but the steps are more or less the same).
You can use your Linux server as a network-accessible Windows share by installing Samba. You may want to add users so everyone can access their own individual shares as well. Once you’ve got things configured, it’ll make for easy access for streaming to other computers in your network.
Now, you’ll want to make sure you have a Dynamic DNS service configured, so you can easily get into your home network from work or on vacation (for fun, of course). And, to make most of the fun stuff work from outside of your network, be sure to forward your ports properly.
Another thing that might be of interest to you is virtual private networking. You can set up a PPTP VPN server on Ubuntu or on Debian if you follow our guide.

Serving Up Webpages

One of the most common ways Linux geeks choose to put their systems to work is with a LAMP setup – Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Apache is the big boy in serving up webpages, MySQL handles all of the database requirements for various webapps you might want to install, and PHP takes care of the rest. Check out our guide for an easy setup that includes a few tools to help manage things.
On the other hand, if you decided to run a LAMP server in a virtual machine – not a bad idea since the requirements are low and you can easily migrate the VM – you should check out our Wiki page on Tweaking a Dedicated Virtual Web Server. You’ll find quite a few changes you can make to fit your particular set up there.